Jesus said that His followers would be salt and light in the world. But how does that play out when the worldview of authentic Christianity and our modern culture are often in direct opposition to one another? What is at root of these opposing views and how can the message of Christ be brought into cultural questions? Does ancient Christianity have anything to say to our modern world? Has the Church forgotten how to respond to the cultural challenges? Has the link between the Bible and world been lost? Join us tonight at 8p Central as we explore this and other questions facing the Church today on Sunday Night Discussions. This week we will sit down with our guest Brandon Wolfram to look at how followers of Jesus can regain a confidence in the Word of God as an intellectual, moral, and philosophical system that grounds humanity. Do you have questions on this subject? Then feel free to send in those questions and comments here or via our “Sunday Night Discussions” Google + page or Facebook page.

Well here we go again. Every six months or so some self-proclaimed expert gains temporary notoriety by boasting from their special research that the authenticity of Bible and the claims of Christianity are a sham. Today’s scholar, Michael Paulkovich, writes to prove the messiah is a myth by citing more than 100 writers of the first and second century in which none of them mention Jesus. In short, his first argument being that if Jesus really did exist, then theses educated experts would have written about him. However, the simple absence of Jesus in the documents of these writers does not logically conclude that they had never heard of him. Even if they did not have knowledge of Jesus this does not prove that Jesus was a myth. All we know for certain is that they didn’t write about him. In one sense though, this would actually be expected as the mission of Jesus was not one of vying for public recognition. Jesus didn’t come for the paparazzi of the day or swim in the circles of the writers that Paulkovich referenced. Rather, Jesus spent most of his time with the least of humanity. The other side of the coin of which Paulkovich fails to research is the archaeological and historical writers of the era who did speak of Jesus. Here are just a few historians of the day who wrote about Christ. (more…)

I remember reading about Johannes Kepler in High School and know he was a smarter man than me. But of course that’s not hard to imagine especially when it comes to math and science. But I came across his name again while studying for my sermon this week. Indeed, Kepler was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer. You may not know this, but he was also a serious minded man of faith and follower of Christ. While Kepler was credited in discovering new planetary movements and even today has departments of NASA named after him, he also gave serious effort to finding of the Star mentioned in Matthew 2:2. This was the Star that led the Biblical Wiseman to Bethlehem on their search for the birth of Jesus. Like Galileo, Newton, and other brilliant scientist of old, Kepler didn’t take the path of many modern scientist who choose to reason away the divine. He didn’t hold that science explains away God; but rather that science was just another tool to explore the magnitude of God and figure out this great creation of God we call the cosmos. (more…)